Fat Cat Quilts

Three down...

I have been tackling my UFO List with a vengeance these past couple weeks. 

Attached bindings on UFO #59, #66 and #70. Check, check and check. I will hand sew them down this weekend while I am at our annual quilt show.

UFO #13 I gave away to a friend who was way more excited about it than I was. 

UFOs #7, #29 and #48 I sold on ebay. Who knew? May they rest in peace in someone else's house.

And #12, a set of six snowman blocks from a block swap years ago, I gave to another friend who needs to make a snowman quilt for a friend for Christmas. Win win. 

Last weekend, at our monthly sew-in, I finished the tops of four of my oldest projects. Two of them are over ten years old. It felt like such an accomplishment. And the surprising thing was that I still liked all four of them. While I was at it, I used my scraps to make bindings for them also. So now, I just need to quilt them up and BAM! I'm ready to go with the binding. 

This kaleidoscope quilt was a project I started at the first quilt retreat I went to when I began quilting. The fabrics were not my first choice, but the ones I had picked out initially didn't work properly to achieve the kaleidoscope effect. While I'm not a floral lovin' gal, this print had an excellent repeat for the kaleidoscope pieces. The black open spaces would be great for some decorative quilting, but I'm leaning towards just doing an allover design to finish it and moving on. And if I had been thinking, I would have picked up all those loose strings laying on the top before I started taking pictures. 

This eye-searing bright Mickey quilt is actually from a class I taught years ago. This was one of the models I had worked on for the class, and all it needed was borders. The pattern is called Hidden Wells. It's no longer in print, but you can find skads of tutorials online. It's an easy strip-piecing pattern, but every single seam is on the bias. I spray starched the tar out of it to keep it from stretching as I was assembling it. Especially as I was attaching the borders. 

Next up was my Native Rainbow, a quilt I started at a retreat with Laurie Shifrin years ago. Last year I had assembled the blocks at one of our sew-ins, but it took me a while to pull it back out and put the borders on. Now it's ready to be quilted. I love how this one turned out. I loved the grape fabric that I picked for the outer border and had so much fun pulling colors from that for the center blocks. I think I might have also been planning on enlarging this at one time, because I found enough cut pieces to easily make an entire second quilt. I wonder what I was thinking. Maybe I just wanted a variety of blocks to choose from. Who knows. I am very pleased with how this one turned out and look forward to quilting it.

I suppose I shouldn't really say I've completed this last top yet, as I still need to attach the last outer blue border. But I was able to get the bulk of it assembled last weekend, which is a step up from the box it's been in. This is a block draw from about ten years ago. Our group used to do a monthly draw, where each month, one person's name was drawn from a hat and they picked out a main fabric and gave a fat eighth to everyone in the group, who in turn, would make a 12" block and return them to you throughout the month. If you remember, in my early quilting days, I was in a relationship with anything patriotic, and this silver-specked blue tone-on-tone was high on my list of beloved fabrics. Yes, silver-specked. Yep.

I love the crisp contrast between the blue and bright white, but am a little less enamored now with the sparkly silver bits. I'm hoping that once it's quilted, I can run it through the wash a few times and the silver specks will wash off. I'm assuming it will, since it's left a gratuitous trail of silver glitter every where it been in the last ten years. Even as I put together the blocks last week and was cutting the strips for the outer border, it filled up the crevices in my cutting mat with silver residue and my rotary blade sparkles like a shiny new penny nickel. I can only imagine what the inside of my bobbin casing must look like. 

I am thrilled with the outcome of this top. I love that the blocks are made by my friends who I quilt with. While I usually do most of my own quilting, I would like to send this one out for a custom job. I'd love some feathered wreaths in the setting triangles and large open areas between the blocks, and continued around the outer border. 

I'm headed down South in a couple weeks for the holidays, so I don't know if I'll get to quilting these tops before the new year, but I certainly feel like I've made a productive dent in my stash of projects. I almost think I should reward myself and start something new...

 

Fall & Winter

Last year, I participated in a Pay It Forward wildfire on Facebook where I'm one of five people my friend Jane will Pay it Forward to with a homemade goody, and then I, in turn, will continue to Pay it Forward to five people. And the paying and forwarding and smiling and loving continues on and on forever. And ever. Amen. 

Just in time for Thanksgiving, my homemade goody arrived in a big box from Jane. I was overwhelmed by her generosity. She made me a whole lap quilt! Out of sumptuous fall-colored batiks. My favorite of all the batiks. It's warm and welcoming and just plain gorgeous. I washed it, keeping my fingers and toes crossed for any bleeding batiks, and now it's all crinkly from the dryer. I love it! It is a perfect addition to my fall decor, folded up on the loveseat. That's my re-purposed/up-cycled garage sale chair that I painted black. It's not as dinged up as it looks in the picture. It has bits of ice and frozen leaves on it. I suppose I should bring that in so they can thaw out and the chair can go away until some other holiday where I feel like sitting something on an old black chair on my front porch. That pumpkin, which is also frozen to the chair, says BOO on the other side in haunting script letters. I kept waiting for a nice day to go take a picture of it on my front porch amidst all the bright yellow fall leaves, but it was always so gray and gloomy. And then it snowed. And then it wasn't Halloween anymore and I turned it around to hide the BOO. But before the whole lot goes away for Christmas, I did go out and take a picture with my new fall throw. In the snow. 

Winter has thrust herself upon us with much disdain this year. And early too! We've had more snow this November than we usually get all winter. It's absolutely thrilling. Every time it snows, I get all excited and think this will be the time, that once in a lifetime experience, when you wake up in the morning and go to the window and see a sea of white three feet deep. I have always wanted to be snowed in. To lounge around in my comfiest sweats and pink fuzzy moose socks and watch chick flicks and sew, intermittently napping, maybe making homemade chocolate chip cookies - and all guilt free! Everyone knows you can't feel guilty for luxuriously spending an entire day baking and sewing when you have no other choice but to stay nestled inside the house. 

So far, no three feet of snow except up on the Summit. Plenty of snow there. We took a drive the other night just as the sun was setting on the peaks. And by night, I mean 3:00 in the afternoon. It was gorgeous and pink and my pictures never quite show what it really looked like. For starters, I have been unable to capture the sheer vastness of the valley laying below you when you're looking out from the Summit. It has amazed me, and eluded me, for years. 

My friend and I (ad)ventured North on a day trip to Whitehorse last week. I was in need of cat food, and my friend was up for an adventure, so we took off for the 110 mile drive into the Yukon. We saw a moose, which is always exciting, and enjoyed some fabulous Mexican food for lunch. We shopped and marked everything off our lists and stopped to buy a dozen donuts to bring home on our way out of town. Donuts are quite a commodity here in Skagway. And there, in line, while we were perusing the donut case, staking out our twelve favorites, we heard the bad news. The highway had been closed. We had just become honorary Canadians for the evening. With nothing to do. After all, everything on the list was checked. And here it was, 3:30 in the afternoon and we were stuck. In a foreign country. And it was -22 outside and blowing hard crusty snow in an angry blizzard. What to do?

We hit up the quilt shop. Hah!

Whitehorse has a fantastic quilt shop called Bear's Paw Quilts. Stuffed to the gills with bright batiks, and fuzzy flannels (flannels are a big deal up here), and an absolutely mesmerizing array of quilt models lining the walls. The gals who work there are friendly, and a fun time is had by all. We stocked up on ideas and fabric and enjoyed the company. Then we lingered through pasta for as long as two people can possibly stretch out one single meal in an effort to kill time, bought pajamas and toothbrushes at Walmart, and settled in for the evening at our hotel with a pile of quilt magazines. The only downside of being snowbound in Whitehorse was that neither of their movie theaters was showing Footloose. And I am chomping at the bit to see the new Footloose. It remains at the top of my list for when I go down South. That and the Fiesta Ware display at Dillards.

And as I type, it has just now started snowing. Again! Maybe tomorrow will be the lucky day...